Tag: SharePoint

This is a simple trick that gives a bit of context to the end users of a SharePoint site. This technique is not new, and has been used by various web pages for a long time. It can be easily utilized in SharePoint context as well. In rich text like wiki pages and article pages you will often find a few links to different types of content. By default you don’t really know where the links will take you, unless you take a closer look at the browser’s preview of the URL on mouseover. It would be much easier to know where the links lead you (astray) if the links are being prepended by an icon, letting you recognize which content the links are pointing to.

Types of link icons

In my recent project we created this functionality for a few types of content, as you see from the example above. The types of content are internal link, external link, link to document, link to image, link to a user’s mysite profile and a mailto-link. We’ve also created a link icon for “the magnificent tool”. This is a selection of pages living in SharePoint within a specific site. Even though the links are to internal pages, we want them to have their own style, as “the magnificent tool” should be recognized beyond a normal internal link. Of course you could add as many or few types of link icons as you’d like.

How does it work?

I have defined a method Pzl.Core.AddLinkIconsToAnchorTags which accepts a jQuery selector for the anchor tags that should get link icons. This way the method can be reused on different kind of pages, for example wiki pages and article pages. The method is called when the DOM is ready, and it should also just be called when the page is in display mode, not in edit mode (or else it will insert into the markup of your content, which you really don’t want).

The method itself looks like the following piece of javascript. As is apparent from the comments, a check is made for making sure the page is not in edit mode. A check is also made for each anchor tag in the selector, checking if it’s not a anchor tag in a SharePoint web part. This is because we don’t want to apply link icons to out of the box webparts, because this will make things look really weird.

There are a few things to note here. First, pzl-icon-container is the css-class we’re adding to the anchor tag. We’re checking, just in case, that this class is not already present for the anchor element (we don’t want to add icons twice). We are also checking that the anchor doesn’t include an image, as we don’t want to add icons if we have image links – that would look bad. Moving on, we’re grabbing the actual href (url) of the anchor tag and checking that the url isn’t undefined or a javascript link.

Get to the point already!

Pzl.Core.GetIconClassForLinkUrl(url) is getting the link icon for that url, based on a set of rules. Basically it returns us an object with a className-property and a toolTip-property, as well as a property saying whether the link is external or not. The className-property is used for styling the icon, i.e. setting the right icon, and the toolTip-property is used as a tooltip for when the user is hovering the link icon.

We generate the span-markup for the link icon and add target=_blank to the anchor if it’s an external link. Finally, we’re adding the .pzl-icon-container and .inline-icon CSS-classes to the anchor tag, and prepending it with the link icon markup.

Deciding on the type of link

The logic for deciding on the type of link is a mix of regular expressions tests and indexOf-checks. I guess i could make it all regex tests. The checks are quite simple, and it’s easy to add new ones. As you see, the if’s higher up will “overrule” the if’s further down, meaning that e.g. a profile page link icon will take effect over an external url link icon and an external link icon will take effect over a document link icon.

CSS and making it look good

It would be pointless to post all the CSS for all the types of link icons we use here, but I’m going to share an example. We are using a sprite for icons, and hence all icons share background-image, and just use different positions. Here you’ll also see the reason why we’re using the .pzl-icon-container, to get a nice hover effect on the icons when the link is being hovered.

The boring part if you want to roll your own

You’ll have to create your own graphics sprite or handle the icons in your own way for this to work. It would be smoother if this worked without dependency on creating custom icons. The benefit of doing that though, is that you can make the icons with style and form consistent with the rest of your SharePoint site.

The final result

An example of how this is in play is seen in the following picture, here the user is hovering over the magnificent tool-link.

In the project I’m currently working on we are creating a solution in SharePoint 2013 for content that previously has been in word documents. The content is very text-focused, and consists almost entirely of headings and text blocks. We are using enterprise wiki as the new home for the content in SharePoint.

One of the “key features” of the documents (and Word-documents in general) are the table of contents, where you get quick links to the sections you are interested in. This was a feature we wanted to have in SharePoint as well, and what’s better than having the table of contents auto-generated to avoid ToC’s that needs to be manually updated and often go stale.

The solution is pretty simple. In the page layout we’re using, I’ve added a header and an empty unordered list.

The Javascript

When the DOM is ready, we’re calling a nice little function that iterates over all the h1 and h2 tags in the document, adds anchor bookmarks to the headings and adds the headings to the table of contents. To make it somewhat more reusable, the function takes the selector of the table of contents list element and the selector of the section we are looking for headers in.

The looks of it

Which creates a table of contents that looks similar to the image in the top of this post (there are some other css styles defined which are not relevant).

Back to the top

When the user gets to the bottom of the page, he most likely would love to go the top again. Hence I’m adding a simple bookmark-link to go to the top of the page after the content section.

<a href="#top">To the top</a>

That’s basically it! The solution would work fine as it is now.

Bonus: Smoothscrolling

Wouldn’t it be great if the browser scrolled smoothly down to the sections we cared about instead of skipping down instantly? This way it’s more clear to the user what happens at the click of the button.

Smoothscrolling in SharePoint apparently wasn’t that easy . I’m going to spare you the details, but the final solution I ended up with was the one discussed and improved over at the technet forums. I did some minor modifications to the script discussed there, and came up with the following function which I’m calling after generating the Table of Contents.

After the scrolling has happened I still want the #bookmark in the URL, in order to allow directly linking to sections as well as back and forth functionality in the browser. That’s why I’m setting window.location.hash = hashVal.

In order to set the welcome page of a web template, the documented and most common way is to use the publishing feature in your onet.xml, which have a feature parameter for setting the welcome page. Sometimes you don’t want to use the publishing framework for various reasons. In my case I was creating a variant of the team site STS#0 web template, and in my opinion the publishing feature does not belong in a team site – especially if it’s just there for setting the welcome page.

Surprisingly Google does not give any results on how to set the welcome page url declaratively (without resorting to the publishing feature), only programmatically. The solution is actually very simple, and was discovered by setting a custom welcome page in a web, exporting the web as template and investigating the modules inside the exported .wsp. The welcome page url property is persisted using the rootfolder’s property bag.

To set a custom welcome page in a web template using no-code and no-publishing, do the following

Create a web-scoped feature, e.g. WebTemplatePropertyBagFeature

Add an empty element, e.g. WelcomePageProperty, to the project and to the feature above. The Elements.xml for the WelcomePageProperty element should look similar to the following (replace SitePages/MyCustomFrontPage.aspx with the name of the page you want to use as frontpage for the web)

I recently logged into a SharePoint 2010 App Server (Server 2008 R2 SP1) and started SharePoint Management Shell. I was greeted with the familiar “The local farm is not accessible. Cmdlets with FeatureDependencyId are not registered”, and were also unable to execute any SharePoint PowerShell commands. The ventured reader will recognize this error, it’s the one that is displayed when the logged in account does not have permissions. The fix for that is quite easy, add the user as Shell Admin using Add-SPShellAdmin (using an account with appropriate permissions, of course).

In this case, however, this did not make any sense. I had previously used the SharePoint 2010 Management Shell on this server and, just to confirm, one of the local IT Administrator were also granted this warning message and were unable to run any SharePoint PowerShell commands.

Further investigation showed that the server had been patched using Windows Update earlier the same day. One of the updates that had been installed was KB5206143, Windows Management Framework 3.0 for Windows 7 SP1 and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1, which among other features installs PowerShell 3.0. The update was published (published 11. Nov. 2012), As you might know, SharePoint 2010 does not like PowerShell 3.0 very much, yet… This is actually an issue even in Server 2012.

A bug has been raised for PowerShell 3.0, but closed by Microsoft with the message:

Perhaps a fix is coming in a cumulative update soon? Until then, the workaround is quite simple: Start PowerShell with the parameter “-Version 2.0” or just “-v 2” and then add the SharePoint Snap-In using “Add-PSSnapIn Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell”.

I haven’t tried to uninstall the Windows Management Framework 3.0, but I don’t see why that wouldn’t work as well.

We have all learned to love and adore the Content by Query Web Part (CQWP) for showing content from our site collection without having to put our hardcore developer gloves on. It’s great for easily showing content of a certain kind, from a certain site or belonging to a certain user. We’re usually configuring the web part using the three filter properties of the web part in order to show the content we’re looking for. Unfortunately, sometimes three filter properties are not enough.

Say we have several lists of a certain content type with the three columns Status, Responsible and Assigned. We want to show items from this list where status is equal to ‘Open’, and the current user is either in the Responsible-column or in the Assigned-column. We are unable to use the web part’s properties to filter the content, because the three filter properties of the web part is not enough for us to formulate the query. We want items where Status=Open AND (Responsible=Current User OR Assigned=Current User). Unfortunately the filters will be interpreted as (Status=Open AND Responsible=Current User OR Assigned=Current User). This will give us all items where Status is Open and Responsible is Current User, but it will also give us all items where Assigned is Current User, independent on the Status! We don’t have any possibility to change which expression is being interpreted first. This leads us to the QueryOverride property. (Never mind that the MSDN documentation is awful and incorrect: “Gets or sets the list field name used to filter the set of list items.”?)

The QueryOverride property allows us to write good, old CAML. You can try writing the CAML-queries by hand, but I recommend checking out CAML Designer, SharePoint CAML Query Helper or some other tool to help you write those hairy CAML-queries.

Now to the point of this post. Using tools like the above or by looking up resources in various tech forums, the CAML used to filter items by the current user leads us to the following CAML:

This looks great, right? Well, it’s actually not working in the QueryOverride-property (the generated CAML is working in the CAML-tools and data queries). After a lot of experimenting, I found out that you cannot look up the Integer value of the user when filtering on the current user! Fortunately, only minor changes are necessary to get it to work. Change Type from Integer to User, and remove the type attribute from the UserID tag. The working CAML should look like the following:

A final note on how to use the QueryOverride property: In your .webpart file you should wrap the CAML in the CDATA tag, and you should remove spaces and line breaks. If you’re deploying your web part to a page through a module, you need to HTML-encode the CAML. The easiest way I have found to do this is to deploy the .webpart file with the Queryoverride property set, and then add the webpart to a page. You should then be able to export it, and the QueryOverride-property will have it’s content encoded, which you can reuse.